Yup, that's the offroad bit just south and east of Kielder village. It's quite a thrilling, remote-feeling traverse of hills, just sneaking inside the Scots border over a stream, before nipping back into Ingerland.

It's a ten-mile stretch or so, most of it pebbly forest tracks, and just the one section about quarter of a mile of sheeptrack, pictured in the post.

To be fair, the offroad option is heavily signposted as being offroad and needing good quality mountain bikes. The on-road alternative is fine, if a little roundabout.

I just feel a bit cheated by such things, I suppose: I'm perfectly capable of navigating my own routes with copious maps by either roads or offroad tracks, depending on which bike I picked off the garage pile that weekend. What niggles is the lack of consistency in signposted major national routes: they're a hotchpotch of good and bad surfaces. I wish I knew more reliably what I was going to get.

Another very irritating example is National Route 1 - yes, that's '1' - between Scarborough and Whitby. It's the Cinder Track, an old railway line that's direct, traffic-free, often gloriously scenic - and a pig to ride on because the surface is frankly awful, requiring a well-suspensioned bike much of the time.